For example, Lenin writes: “… there is nothing resembling "sectarianism" in Marxism, in
the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose
away from the highroad of development of world civilisation.” This is true.

But Lenin immediately follows with: “The Marxian doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is complete
and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world conception” - in
other words, he says, it is fixed, hidebound and petrified.

This pair of sentences constitutes a self-contradiction by
Lenin. What happened to the “highroad of development of world civilisation” in
between the two statements? Did it come to a dead end?

“The philosophy of
Marxism is materialism,” writes Lenin, and not “old and rotten idealism.” This is philosophy reduced to catechism,
or of pat answers to “Frequently Asked Questions”. It is not much use, not even
as propaganda. It is so much simplified as to be dangerous.

Actually, Marx himself opposed the concept of a “doctrine”
that would be “omnipotent because true”, or “complete”. Marx’s work was not
complete in his lifetime, and if he had been blessed with two lifetimes, he
would surely have left, not less, but more like double the amount of
revolutionary work-in-progress. The more work Marx did, the larger was the
frontier that he opened up.

Lenin writes: “Where
the bourgeois economists saw a relation of things (the exchange of one
commodity for another), Marx revealed a relation of men.” This is true.
Marx was concerned with the men, more than with the things. This is why it is
necessary to be careful with the word “materialism”.

Lenin writes: “The
doctrine of surplus value is the cornerstone of Marx's economic theory.”
This is only half true. Surplus Value is not merely the cornerstone of some
discrete part of Marxism called “economic theory”. It is much more than that.
The sale of Labour-Power to a capitalist at the point of production, and the
subsequent expropriation of the entire product of the worker’s labour by the
capitalist, is the source of Surplus Value. It is also the source of class
differentiation and class conflict. It is the reason for the necessity of the
development of a collective popular Subject of History around the working-class
cause.

In short, it is good to examine the abstract parts of any
phenomenon, including “Marxism”, but only if one is to proceed to a synthesis,
or concretisation of these parts into a dynamically-comprehended whole. That is
how dialectics works. That is how an examination of the sources and component
parts of Marxism should be concluded, but in this instance Lenin does not quite
succeed in doing so. Instead, he leaves the parts as parts. He leaves us with a
list of ingredients, but not the finished cake.

Lenin writes: “While
increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system
creates the great power of united labour.”

Capitalism does create a working class, and it organises it
as a labour-force, but it does not unite it politically. This, like the
previous examples, shows the danger of over-simplification. Lenin was no doubt
writing for workers, and brevity was his aim, and he possessed an extraordinary
ability to compress difficult ideas into a few, clear words. Yet even Great
Lenin, the most famous advocate of determined, deliberate political
organisation, including vanguard organisation of professional revolution (e.g.
in “What is to be Done?”)
could be tempted to undermine himself in the over-pursuit of simplification.

Lenin recovers this particular matter of organisation in the
document’s concluding paragraph, where he even mentions South Africa (this was
in 1913):

“Independent organisations of the proletariat are multiplying all over
the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The
proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle;
it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its
ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes;
it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.”